Google Slave Master?

I disagreed strongly with G.W. Bush’s lies and folly in Iraq. Presto, my web site disappeared from USA search engines. I was ridiculed by Silicon Alley “friends”: information wants to be free, search engines were beyond any suspicion, did not care about ants such as me. Fast forward to 2012: Google hissed it will be “constrained” to “no longer reference French websites“. Admire the hypocrisy. So much for not manipulating searches. Here is the object of Google’s ire:

Google Slaying French Culture Minister: Brains & Style.

Aurélie Filippetti ministers to advanced culture.

“I’m a little surprised by the tone of this correspondence, which is akin to a threat. You do not deal with a democratically elected government through threats.” Warns the French Culture Minister.

What do Google guys know about democracy?

Aurélie Filippetti has (basically) a PhD in classical literature, published books translated in many languages, is a Member of Parliament, and France’s Culture Minister. In France the culture ministry is traditionally very important. It covers, among others, the information technology ministry. Filippetti, the daughter of an emigrant miner, belongs to a class vastly superior to the mostly uneducated, unelected Silicon Valley filthy rich conspirators.

French newspaper publishers asked the government in September for a bill compelling search engines, to pay them each time a user reads an article by clicking through to their websites.

Let’s go the crux of the matter: Google makes money out of clicks (from advertizing revenue). Click to what? Authors. Are these authors Google employees? No, Google does not pay those authors. So Google is making profits from the work of others that it does not pay for.

Google makes money by using other people’s work, without compensation. When an owner does not pay people for the work that makes him rich, it’s slavery. It’s the first order definition of slavery.

Europe has seen that movie before. More than 1,000 years ago. Bathilde queen of the Franks, herself an ex-escaped slave, outlawed making a slave (“servus“) of any citizen of the Imperium Francorum (to be rebaptized 150 years later the “Renovated Roman Empire”).

Nevertheless, in the following centuries, many a freeman came “to be a slave” (“servire“) through force or necessity. Sometimes freeholders or allodial owners were intimidated into dependency by the greater physical or legal force of a local plutocrat or magnate. Crop failure, a war or brigandage left a farmer unable to survive on his own. A bargain was struck with a plutocrat, or mighty knight (lord of a manor, to pay for the very expensive weapons and training).

In exchange for protection from the knight, service was required, in cash, produce or with labor, or a combination thereof. These bargains were formalized in a ceremony known as “bondage” in which a serf placed his head in the lord’s hands, similar to the ceremony of homage where a vassal placed his hands between those of his overlord (or kissed his boot). Such people came to be known as “serfs”. “Serf” was a modification of the Latin word for slave, just like the condition of bondage was different, but also viewed as related to slavery. Being a serf was hereditary, but could be exited by staying away thirty days (during which time the lord could hunt down his recalcitrant serf).

England was about 20% slaves until 1066 CE, when the conquering Franks outlawed slavery.

The key enabling concept here is intimidation. Very rich persons intimidated the population into plutocracy. Very rich people, or great plutocratic institutions, had attributed themselves, without any constitutional basis, illegitimate powers, through the sheer power of intimidation. An unintimidated serf who fled to a city, taking the law in his own hands, was thereafter free.

Finally, central governments, unintimidated, grabbed back those illegitimate powers. It took a while, and the central government had to play dirty: Philippe IV Le Bel broke both the Templars and the Papacy shortly after 1300 CE, but it’s only with the mighty efforts of Louis XI and his daughter, the regent queen Anne de France, that France got definitively united as a country under an effective, all mighty national government, shortly before the official discovery of the Americas. (Thus inaugurating the archtypical modern nation-state.)

Google’s slave masters, apparently unaware of 30 centuries of rather ferocious history, are trying to intimidate the French Republic into submission. Not knowing, from full ignorance of the great classics, that few passions give more pleasure to the French and their Gallic ancestors than to put a shining armor on, condemn, and charge evil doers.

Here is a friend of mine, the USA born Amna Shiekh, giving us what all too many in Wall Street admiring circles will consider to be the obvious argument:

“The difference between these French people who are crying thievery and myself – I am GRATEFUL that Google provides a service allowing my websites to be found through keywords…. At no cost to me. My websites would have no chance of being found otherwise. There is a service being provided here. And if you don’t want to contribute to it, then don’t cry when it’s taken away? Very simple!”

Patrice Ayme: “Me me me me me me me me me, or, as Mick Jagger would have it in Gloom & Doom: meeeeeeeeeee is, indeed, the best explanation most people have found, under most circumstances. A generalization of me me me me me me, is us us us us us, also known as nationalism. Being GRATEFUL to the Lords is also most wise, for the commoners, and those who, like worms, like to burrow underground. Slave masters were, are, also providing a service, they always have been, always do. Many love to be punished, it makes them feel important.

Around 1800 CE, it has been evaluated that three quarters of humankind lived in some form of slavery.

The ubiquitousness of slavery explains much of the submitted, and impoverished state, most of the world was in, until recently. (By comparison the French Revolution of 1789 made most French allodial owners, that is, supreme sovereigns on their land… which is still not the case in Great Britain (all land is the Crown’s, all Brits are…vassals)… nor in the USA (“eminent domain” being rather relaxed there)).

Nobody is advocating doing without search engines. They existed well before Google. (And, besides having Sequoia Capital and their associates backing up Google, I do not see what Google brought to search that did not exist before). Because searches are manipulated, search engines are a matter of national security. The fact that an obviously plutocratic organization has achieved a world monopoly on searches is obviously a worry for democracy.

When Francia outlawed slavery, in 655 CE, it was to make the median individual more potent. Not because it was easy, but because it short-circuited plutocracy, the accumulation of ever greater wealth, be it through unfair means (Google, Buffet), or even by any means (hence the Frankish Salian law equalitarianism, preventing the growth of extreme power for the few).

Outlawing slavery reconstituted the mood and power of the early Roman republic, and allowed to rise huge republican armies when the so far undefeated Arab and Berber armies invaded France in 721 CE.

In democracy, humanity in full is in power. That makes democracy, all else been equal, the mightiest social organization in brains and war.

Plutocracy says only an oligarchy of individuals, emotions and ideas are in power. It’s a form of mutilation, parasitism, a malaria of the mind.

Humanity in full is more powerful, and that is why the Franks were able to break the “Germani”, the Arab Muslim invaders (721 CE-750 CE), the Avars, the Vikings, and, with their descendant regimes (such as England, or Spain) conquer much of the world militarily, and all of it, philosophically (at least formally: even Al Assad leads a “republic”). Nowadays the main Frankish philosophical drive is basically the United Nations Charter. Outlawing slavery is its core.

Slavery is why the management of Greco-Roman civilization by the Greco-Romans failed, and why management transferred to the Franks, and their simple idea of synchronizing polity and humanity, by outlawing it. (In other words, on a giant civilizational scale, what Obama failed to do on his teeny tiny scale, as he left the slavery inducing Wall Street of 2008in power, throughout his fateful reign, and its symbols are Summers and Geithner… but I digress, although reckoning is at hand…)

Amna Shiekh: “Yes, I do think the French who agree with you are crying me me me me me me me – though I don’t think it’s very effective. Maybe when we were five years old this tactic worked quite well….your slave master analogy doesn’t work either. Google isn’t providing a necessary means to live (food, shelter, safety, etc.) that forces me to agree with them…they are not offering something I cannot easily refuse….in other words, your analogy fails.”

Patrice Ayme: Living without the Internet (and its searches) is becoming increasingly impossible. So Google provides with a necessary service.

Google does not pay the people they use to make money, for their work. That’s the definition of slavery. You point out that you profit. Some, no doubt, profit. From slavery some always profited, otherwise slavery would not have come to be. In Rome, some companies specialized in catching escaped slaves, and others in torturing, or executing slaves. Such companies no doubt cried a river when the Franks made their work unlawful. It’s not because you can easily refuse to partake in murder, than murder should not be illegal.

Google whined that their business model was threatened with extinction if France went on with making them pay taxes. Well, too bad. If Google charged for air, and refused to pay taxes, it should be driven out of business too.

French newspaper publishers asked the French government to intervene against Google in September. Newspapers, journalists, editorialists create ideas (hopefully).

But, fundamentally, Google creates… nothing independently of that substrate of ideas it helps search for, but did not create. (I know Google goes around with cars, taking pictures; but so doing is not creating ideas; if Google did not do it, volunteers certainly would do so, it’s very easy with modern technology.)

This is the general problem with the world economy right now: many manipulators have seized command, when they create nothing fundamental. They are like the Duchess of Cambridge, the Duchesse of Hypocrisy, going around, busy making their celebrity and parasitism fundamental, thanks to their symbiosis with a perverted established order of damnation, dragging not just civilization, but the entire biosphere, into oblivion.

Google leaders should have realized that, by being the world’s largest search engine, they had a moral duty, a fiduciary position, and it was only cautious corporate governance, to behave as an exemplary corporate world citizen. When Google threatened to boycott all and any French sites, it showed, not just its ugly nature, but the fact that it imagines itself as a dangerous, all powerful monopoly. Of course, it will become something of this sort, only if the French Republic let it do as it pleases (we do not expect anything from the White House, for the usual reasons, re-hashed by the end of this essay!). If France can bring down the crafty homicidal maniac Kadafi, its enormous army and secret services, plus connection with USA oil companies, she can cut Google down to size.

In 1936, Hitler decided to kill the Spanish republic, and the Nazi dictator carried by air the rebel Spanish Moroccan army (led by rogue general Franco) into Spain. He did this, thanks to oil from Texaco, a Texas based oil company (the fact were later determined by the Congress of the USA, Texaco got a symbolic fine, so they are a matter of official USA history).

By the way, this explains why the French Front Populaire, then in power, and led by Prime Minister Leon Blum, a Jew, was leery to intervene massively in Spain. Blum knew very well that plutocrats from the USA and their evil corporations were the enablers of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, and that the French and Spanish Republics were under systematic attack by the united forces of plutocracy. (And that war is still going on, with different puppets, Karzai one of them… But the strings pulled from the same establishment and mood. A case in point being Harvard, still central now, as it was in the 1920s and 1930s, making Nazi songs really inspiring.)

Nowadays, this sort of things ought to be meditated more carefully than ever: Hitler pretty much became all he could be, from the help of co-investing plutocratic corporations of the USA. To this day, IBM got away with graciously leasing to all Nazi extermination camps computers, servicing them everyday. The entire Shoah was driven by up to 10,000 computers managed directly by IBM New York, through Geneva. And that is just one case out of many crucial aids to Naziland.

Nowadays, as I said, three quarters of world finance is just the largest mafia the world has ever known. That Google thinks it can get giant profits from the sweat of real mental creators, without any compensation to them whatsoever is typical of the plutocratic mentality, namely everything for a few, in exchange for nothing, but insults.

Some will object that evil obsessed companies such as Google, or Apple made the success of the USA. Indeed: both companies have nearly a trillion dollars of market capitalization, more than the GDP of most countries. (I own a Mc Air, which works very nicely with its solid state drive; Steve Jobs honestly admitted that his company pretty much stole everybody in sight). OK. Fair enough: Apple is a technology integrator (by contrast with a real creator such as Intel). However, the real inventors have got to be rewarded. Neither Apple, nor Google are fundamental innovators (as, say, Intel, or the recent Nobel Laureates in physics and biology are). They are just playing some on TV.

A notorious case, long ago, was the neon tube: the real inventors were not rewarded. The fact that they were French is no excuse: by not rewarding real inventors, one discourages new and future real innovators.

Are vultures evil, do we need them in the real economy? The sixth point of the 10-point corporate philosophy of Google says “You can make money without doing evil.” So why being evil then? To make much more money than society can sustain?

There are two more bones of contention between Google and the French republic: Google’s confidentiality policy, which the French governmental institution Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL)considers violate French and European law. Basically Google buys and sells people’s lives, another way it behaves like a slave master.

When confronted to France, USA plutophiles generally scoff and evoke cheese eating surrender monkeys (exhibiting their ignorance of military history). However France is building the European Union as a French Republic amplification machine (Germany works best when getting orders from above).

In this particular case, organizations similar to CNIL in 29 other European countries (that’s more than half a billion citizens) have mandated the French CNIL to look into Google’s confidentiality policies.

The CNIL found that Google behavior MUST be modified (“doit etre modifie'”). The CNIL found that the selling and “finalities” of personal data could not be justified on security or legitimate Google grounds, or contract, or people’s consent. The Asia Pacific Privacy Authority and Canada are also supporting the CNIL. In other words, France is transmogrifying into the hard point of a worldwide Google modification effort. No wonder silicon minds are freaking out.

And not least: Google pays no tax on all the money it earns from French based companies.

As Sarkozy, the fired French president, not exactly a socialist, pointed out about Google:“It is not permissible that they realize a turnover of several billion euros in France without contributing to tax”.

Silicon dark alley types such as the young Google zillionaires and the old venture capital foxes behind them are not educated in the classical way. The human side of the economy escapes them totally, that’s how they made it. And they have this in common with crocodiles.

But how hard is it to understand? If you make billions in France, you have to pay tax in France. And yes, that could mean billions in taxes. And if you keep on not understanding this, the Republic will use force against you, it is as simple as that. Evil uses force, and only a greater force can dispose of evil.

And what evil is that? It’s not just Google’s hypocrisy shows with its slogan: Don’t be evil (We are in charge of that!), and its worldwide machinations, its tax avoidance. Google can fix all these things overnight.

The problem is much larger, much older, than that. Why does the government of the USA close its collective eyes on this sort of behavior? Why is it that it is the French Republic which has to set straight an American corporation?

As Google’s anti-democratic threat makes pretty obvious, the same sort of plutocracy of the USA which, 80 years ago, was all fired up, and ready to help impose Adolf Hitler onto the world, is still viewed as an asset by Washington. Only the naive would believe that companies such as those which helped Hitler got away with so much, for so long, operated without a particularly Dark Will of a political nature behind them. The same will is still here, 80 years after its Hitlerian triumph. Generations pass away, systems of thought perdure.

Will is a mighty thing, especially when it’s all about grabbing territory. It’s fascinating to see Rome, rendered completely senile by centuries of plutocracy, still rabid about conquering the world, when it had lost all power to do so, in the Third Century. That’s when Rome made several full invasion of Mesopotamia, all the way to the Persian Gulf, and into North West Iran, all the way to the Caspian Sea. A full century after emperor Valerian had been captured (treacherously, during peace talks), his army destroyed, Julian (the emperor elected in and by Paris) was killed in Mesopotamia (with catastrophic consequences).

(Shades of Hitler moving decisively ghost armies around Berlin in April 1945.) The immense riches that people who are nothing (such as the pseudo “founders” of Google, Brin and Page), just because their company pays no taxes, is symptomatic of a system that uses corporations for building an empire, the way Rome used Christianity to expand further than its sword could reach.

So the will to let rogue corporations of the USA conduct their own foreign policy and exploitation of the world is still here, as it was in the 1920 s and 1930s, building up Nazism.

All the more as that method, to use criminal businessmen to leverage even greater criminality was extremely successful in connection with the Nazi adventure, and the Stalin venture, with its near fatal weakening of Europe, and the Muslim Fundamentalist venture, with its resource procurement, etc.

Thanks to the rogue corporation strategy, the USA went from a provincial power (a bit like Australia nowadays) to the world superpower, within a few years. No wonder the rogue corporation models keeps on being applied. All the way to Afghanistan…

A militarized plutocratic Rome kept on invading Mesopotamia, for two centuries, when it was not civilized enough, not republican, nor democratic enough, to cling to it. In a similar fashion, the USA has not comprehended that other nations and peoples are starting to understand exactly what’s going on. Obama’s soporific Cairo speech hypocritically celebrating Islam had a short shelf life.

While I get accused of metastatic conspiracy theorizing, let me smile through an article in a major Arabic newspaper, which “reveals” in depth one of my preferred obsession, and allegation, namely the entanglement between dark operators in Washington, and the worst Muslim Fundamentalism.

As I have explained over the years, that entanglement of evil dates all the way back to Adolf Hitler and its minions, and, lo and behold, that’s exactly what the article observes. Hopefully I will write something on this, while Obama and his Machiavellian sycophants cruise to their well deserved doom and gloom.

Tell the truth long enough, and sometimes it ends up setting evil on fire!

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Why the servus of the Romans came to be called “slaves”? Simple: it was illegal to enslave Franks (by 600 CE everybody was a “Frank”, and by 700 CE, they came to be called “Europeans”). But it was not illegal to enslave Slavs… Charlemagne let the Venitian Republic, a sort of subsidiary of the Renovated Roman Empire, engage, with her mighty fleet, in a prodigious slave trading to the Muslim empire of the Southern Mediterranean.

Indeed, Pendantry! Actually they need no capital, to leverage in any sense, because they pay nought! Even Marx had no anticipated that one, nor Proudhon! After the re-invention of slavery by Google, what’s next? Cannibalism?
PA

the french who agree with you are well intentioned, but missing the point of free information flow. google is providing a service that allows the world to find everyone else in the world – yes, they make money off of it, but it also costs google money to provide the service + all the other insanely expensive services they provide the world (google maps? google apps? all these things are free for everyone….should google start paying people whose land shows up on google maps? let me guess, you say yes. and to that i continue shaking my head at you).

Think of it this way: Google is charging corporations by way of advertising to make all these services free for the rest of the world. if you demand to be paid for these services that CONNECT people and OPEN COMMUNICATION WITH THE WORLD, then don’t be surprised when you’re thrown out of the FREE INFORMATION FLOW loop.

Dear Amna: I did not publish all your comments as a courtesy… But if you prefer, I can publish them all (they are already published on facebook!)
BTW I have a Galaxy III, which uses Android.
Hey you forgot Google Earth! Does that mean you believe Google created Earth? Just asking…

Google is not a great Lord to choose who will be a slave, and when and what tax it will consent to pay where. Nor does it have a right to spy on people, and sell them. If it wants to persist, it shall be punished. Actually the French CNIL ORDERED Google to shape up. Google “Must modify“. They better. Lest they want their market capitalization to keep on evaporating.
PA

another rather brilliant approach i just thought of: you enter a village and you want to know where to get blue yarn, so you ask a kid, “hey where can i get blue yarn?” the kid proceeds to give you a list of 9 or 10 places in town that sells blue yarn, and then you give her 25 cents for her trouble. Now, does that kid OWE the yarn shop that you eventually purchase from a portion of that 25 cents? or does it seem like that yarn shop should be “grateful” for that kid’s help? HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

I think you’re so caught up in the marvellous ‘free’ service you’re getting — TANSTAAFL, btw — that you can’t see the main point that Patrice makes, which is:

Let’s go the crux of the matter: Google makes money out of clicks (from advertizing revenue). Click to what? Authors. Are these authors Google employees? No, Google does not pay those authors. So Google is making profits from the work of others that it does not pay for.

Although Patrice talks here about Google specifically, this situation applies in many places. If, for instance, you work for a corporation and come up with a genuinely new idea on ‘work time’ — one that may be entirely unrelated to your employment — you’ll probably find that the corporation almost certainly owns the ‘intellectual property right’ to your idea.

A great many businesses thrive on the ingenuity of their workers (slaves), and the vast mass of the generated wealth is directed at those at the top of the pyramid (many of whom simply don’t deserve these rewards). This is just? I for one think not.

Dear Pendantry: Excellent observation and generalization. I agree 100%. BTW Amna has managed/owned various successful internet businesses, if I am not mistaken, so she should be able to click with your idea!

Once I was talking with a big time Venture Capitalist partner, and said something along the lines you evoked, and I asked him why it was so. He had been formed as a telecommunication engineer. He told me the problem was those come closest to the money find easy to dip in the pot of gold. So mangers tend to fill their pockets, while the engineers solve the problems. Although highly successful he was himself extremely angry with some of the going-ons in Silicon Valley, not hesitating to use the m word (“mafia“).

A detailled article in the WSJ even explained how the cheating went on, but the Federal gov was not interested, and the FBI was not launched.
PA

Dear Amna: I find you too brilliant for comfort, and I am going to burrow deep underground to escape your glare on this vast desert… ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ…

OK, after thinking underground half asleep for a while, I have arrived at provisional statements…

So Google is a little girl now? In truth, two little boys actually each worth more than 15 billion dollars (Brin & Page)? And I am not talking about Mr. Schmidt, and zillions of Google multimilionaires… Why so rich for something so obvious?

In real life your little boys are selling to third party whatever they could find out about you, up to $5,000 of it… They make 60 billion dollars of revenue, a year, at least, while paying no taxes whatsoever in most countries where they make most of their revenue.

In your example, the shop sells a product to the one who searched. This is exactly what the publishers are requiring the French government to force Google to do. So we basically agree.

Overall, people who work to publish on the Internet will need income, if and when they are professionals, by definition. Paying by click will become natural. Google already exploits that philosophy, and should welcome its expansion. Because it’s that philosophy that has made Google possible.

Pedantry – here’s another one of my comments that Patrice was so courteous to exclude: “Google ads are ONLY on websites that ALLOW those ads to be there (and get paid by Google for them to be there). France is complaining about Google ads being on GOOGLE SEARCH RESULT PAGES which contain snippets of results from across the universe, including France. If France wants to charge for their snippets to be searchable, then I say Google has every right (and should) say screw you, have fun never being found”

So Patrice, do you think France should be able to force Google to include them in search results…and therefore force Google to pay them?

Oh and I came up with a more amusing script of the little girl in the village:

[Small town in France somewhere]
Visitor: “Hi kid, can you tell me where I can buy some blue yarn?”
Kid: “Sure!” *Proceeds to give Visitor a list of 9 or 10 local shops that sell blue yarn*
Visitor: “Hey thanks!” *Gives kid 25 cents for her trouble and proceeds to buy yarn from one of the stores on that list*
[A few hours later]
Store Shop: “HEY KID! I HEARD YOU SCORED 25 CENTS FOR RECOMMENDING MY SHOP! AND THAT GUY ACTUALLY CAME IN HERE AND BOUGHT SOMETHING FROM ME. YOU OWE ME PART OF THAT 25 CENTS”
Kid: “Umm….aren’t you supposed to be thanking me?”
Store Shop: “EXCUSE ME? NO, YOU NEED TO PAY ME NEXT TIME YOU RECOMMEND MY SHOP AND SOMEONE ACTUALLY GOES THERE.”
Kid: “Umm….okay, then I’ll just not recommend your shop anymore.”
Store Shop: “YOU SLAVE OWNER!!!!!!”
Kid: “…”

There are three bones of contention between France and Google.
1) Violation of privacy laws, and exploitation of people (through stolen data). CNIL

2) Astronomical Tax Evasion

3) What you and Google chose to focus on, namely related rights.

Even more amusing script of the little girl in the village:

[Small town in France somewhere]
Visitor: “Hi kid, can you tell me where I can steal some blue yarn?”
Kid: “Sure!” *Proceeds to give Visitor a list of 9 or 10 local shops that sell blue yarn*
Visitor: “Hey thanks!” *Gives kid 25 cents for her trouble and proceeds to steal yarn from one of the stores on that list*
[A few hours later]

Store Shop: “HEY KID! I HEARD YOU SCORED 25 CENTS FOR RECOMMENDING MY SHOP! AND THAT GUY ACTUALLY CAME IN HERE AND STOLE SOMETHING FROM ME. YOU OWE ME PART OF THAT 25 CENTS”

Kid: “Umm….aren’t you supposed to be thanking me?”
Store Shop: “EXCUSE ME? NO, YOU NEED TO PAY ME every time YOU RECOMMEND MY SHOP & SOMEONE ACTUALLY GOES THERE, and steals me.”
Kid: “Umm….okay, then I’ll just not recommend your shop anymore.”
Store Shop: “Thanks. And remember: Next time I call the gendarmes.”
PA

….except your version of my rather brilliant story doesn’t work because the “kid” is supposed to be google….not the visitor……unless of course you are now accusing all web users of being thieves? does this mean i shouldn’t visit your blog anymore!?!? geez you could have just asked me to leave you alone….

Amna: I do not charge for the service I provide. Professional media operators do. Right now, they are dying off. Newsweek, for example, is shutting down Dec 31, 2012 (I am a subscriber, and I am not happy about it). Clearly the pricing model on the Internet is not working. Or, actually in most advanced countries. The Gini Index is getting worse, all the time. I have come across Internet gadzillionaire who just happened to be at the right place at the right time.

Meanwhile professional journalism is dying. In the end it all boils down to money for clicks going to people whose brains are just conspiracy driven.

Internet searches just require energy to turn the computers (nuclear plants worth of energy). But, at the limit, it could be profived not for profit, but from a tax. That would be a better outcome than having no professional journalism whatsoever within five tears, while Page and Brin keep on ordering for themselves the most expensive jumbo jets, and Larry Ellison buys the rest of the entire Hawaiian archipelago.

And you can’t leave me alone, because if you do, I will cry so much, sea level will rise, drowning the Carlos private airport of all the Silicon Valley billionaires, and your mission in life is to make them with loved, desired, admired, revered, accomplished, and the only thing we need to have a society in full.

I hope you vote for Obama. He is like you. All is need in the economy is everyone to celebrate Warren Buffet, the ultimate Godfather, having sunk, all by himself, Greece herself, a work Hercules himself had not been considered for.

I think Patrice needs to cry a little, so by all means =)
I did not understand your sentence about the silicon valley billionaires…..but if i understood correctly that you think they have anything to do with my “mission in life,” then let me assure you, you are incorrect (you should be getting used to this though).
And do you not remember my own blog? With my rather long rant about the uselessness of voting? Do you really think that I will vote for one dummy over another? Ha! Clearly you have forgotten who I am. Choosing the greater of two evils is still choosing evil. And by the way, if you are voting for one dummy over another, then shame on you Patrice!
Especially after insinuating things in your essay with carefully chosen words like “USA born Amna Shiekh” and sticking me in the same sentence as “Wall Street admiring circles” without some sort of explanation about how I am very unlike what most would assume after reading your sentence. You KNOW how much I disapprove of the USA and Wall Street, so don’t try to make me sound like something I am not.
You must be learning how to write from these professional media operators you admire so much, like FOX news or something equally pathetic. They put words like “Google,” “boycotting” and “democracy” together so dumb idiots will have chemical reactions in their half brains that result in them thinking that Google is against democracy….you’re better than that Patrice! Playing with words is fun, but twisting them out of context and real meaning is just doing what you so vehemently disgust so much – not telling the truth.

Dear Amna: Reading what you wrote, I was laughing so hard, I could not see the screen anymore… I just wanted to reassure the public that you were not some Sheik out there, defending her/his huge stake in Google (there are some sheiks who indeed are the largest shareholder of some plutocratic USA corporations and banks, for example Citi)… I do listen a lot to FOX news sometimes, I must admit…

I can understand that I have caught you somewhat exposed to demeaning self contradiction in your ardent support for some of the world’s most blatant tax evading, people selling bipedal sharks on the planet, so I beg forgiveness. But I thinking feeling sorry is the first, and more important part of the redemption process. Thus I congratulate you too, while bemoaning my base character.

Something funny happened. I own an Apple Solid State computer, as i already said.I made a search, an hour ago for 17 inch SSD laptop. Guess what? Soon afterwards, in my AOL mail appeared advertizing for just that sort of laptops. That means, unbeknowst to me, my desires were revealed, analyzed, sold and bought.By Google, directly into AOL.(How come Google knows my email? Are we friends?)

Maybe it’s OK, sometimes, for some. However, suppose all and any of our actions was spied on, and boards would appear on the sides of the roads, paths, and in our faces all the time, trying to persuade us to buy this and that, after violating our minds?

As fas as voting… 1) There are more than 2 candidates for the presidency, besides the two of the plutocratic party. 2) In California, there are plenty of propositions, including some proposing to tax myself, and I approve all of them.

Pray for those who will tax me, just as I pray for those who will tax you, including me, who I find very taxing, especially to you, I must admit…

I have read your blog quite a while already; and what wonders me most is that you are so disrespectful about german people and Germany in general. What makes you so snobbish to make a statement like?: “…(Germany works best when getting orders from above).”. … speaking about slavory 😉

With such ridiculous comment you take a whole nation (80 mio.) as one person (what a generaliziation – and what a missunderstanding of Germany and its histroy).
How do you still think that we can take your other statements serious when you show such selective frensh nationalistic view; and generalization of whole societies.

In general:
You have a selective view of history (but very detailed for specific topics), but you should recognize it is very frensh nationalistic. I hope that the Frensh people will not go mad when recognizing that France is not leading the EU; and Germany will not getting the orders from the top. Unfortunately, this will be a rude awakening for some people living in troubled contries all over the world.

Dear Frank: welcome to the comment section of this site. The pique about Germans doing beter when barked at, was a joke. Of course, as all good jokes, there is an element of truth in it. The Hitler circus went on and on, because nobody wanted to disobeyed orders. Even German heroes who had resisted nazism got a hard time for decades after 1945.The Bundeswehr was still penetrated, and in awe with the likes of Von Manstein, well into the 1950s. OK, Von Manstein was a splendid general, but of a sorry parody of civilization.

The culture is being changed, forcefully. The Bundeswehr has made it a duty to resist and disobey anti-civilizational orders, and recruits are sworn in front of Parliament or in the barracks where Von Stauffenberg and other heroes were summarily assassinated in 1944.

I was extremely negative on Merkel, and some top German bankers and economist six months ago, or more. They were talking as if we were in 1942. But the bad guys have been fired, only one is left, he is isolated. And Merkel has changed her music completely. She is now obeying evidence, and, in some ways, has gone to the other side. She has understood, among other things,that GREXIT would be the beginning of the end. And she has admitted it’s a banking crisis, first of all. Due to rogue banks.

I do not have a French nationalistic view. I am actually extremely anti-nationalistic. Extremely. Obsessively. With all due respect, I make you notice that your name is Frank, not Deutsch. The ECB is located in Frankfurt, not Deutschfurt. The Franks were German, and it is precisely because they were Germans that they threw away (relatively speaking) sexism and slavery. They also literally fabricated not just France, but Germany.

Fascism was clearly invented by the Romans, and Clovis, Consul and Roman general, had a severe crisis in his army to impose it to the Franks, who were insistent that they were comrades not obedient dogs (as Clovis would have them, in the Roman imperator tradition).

I am also supra civilizational. Although I have Wahhabism in my cross hairs, I have grudging respect for some professional Christians and Muslims.

To come back to Germany, Germany was Prussianized. And 18C Prussia was definitively anti-Judaic and hyper authoritarian (following tradtions coming from the Teutonic Knights, at least). The war of 1914-1945 between France and Germany was definitively that of an Open Republic attacked by a fascist racist system. The Republic won. Very good. Now Germany is an Open Republic. There is absolutely no doubt that the present German Republic would ally itself instantaneously with the French Republic against Nazism. Actually, it is.

I have studied this Franco-German problem all my life. Not only did my family have to flee the Gestapo (in France), but the head plotter of 1914, Von Moltke was a distant family relative (by marriage), so I was struck, very early on by what my uncle, an astronomer, (married to an aristocratic German) told me about who was exactly behind 1914 and Hitler.

So rest reassured. In many important ways, I am part German, but, hopefully, part good German (although I recognize some of the Nazis had good allure). You have escaped (so far) my analysis of the battle of Kursk as an example of human thinking… Who defeated Hitler (and Von Manstein!) at Kursk? You will never guess… it’s not how the history books have it. Not at all. (You are invited to guess, ;-)!) Hint: it will change the definition of “anti-German”.
PA

Dear Frank: The consensus in France is pretty much that Germany does its economy right, and France does not, at this point. Hence the agreement to reduce the deficit to .5% (although Germany cheated first on deficit, followed by France, nearly ten years ago.) There is going to be an in depth effort to germanize more the French economy, no doubt. the Prime Minister, Ayrault, a German professor, is versed in German culture. Hitler himself nearly pointed out, the French can out-German the Germans, as Rommel found out at Bir Hakeim, the place where Hitler lost all hope to win World War Two.

The decision to charge towards Stalingrad was taken out of frustration later, as a sort of plan B. Plan A was to encircle Iraq and Azerbadjan, one pincer, headed by Von Manstein across southern Russia, his flank protected by Paulus Sixth Army, the other, headed by Rommel, charging through Palestine.

But first Rommel had to encircle the Eight British Army (that would have destroyed it). That failed when general Koenig blocked the Afrika Korps for two weeks. So the Republic was saved by a French king (Koenig in Deutsch, nota bene).
PA

However, you still need to make a mean comment in brackets again: (..’Germany cheated first…’) . 🙂
How do you know, if it really was Germany who ‘cheated’ first; or was it only frensh diplomats which pushed Germany to cheat first; maybe Germany was not even first; does it really matter? Actually, it does not matter at all! But you could not withstand to mention it in such a way as France ‘cheat’ was better then Germany ‘cheat’, could you? Why does it matter to you?

Anyway; I like most of your thoughts and ideas – and will continue reading it.

dear Frank: Maybe it’s mean, but it’s good that I am mean, because that is the truth. Germany, quickly followed (for once!) by France, were the first two countries to officially cheat on the 3% deficit rule (now down to.5%) Of course Greece was cheating much more and very gravely, then, thanks to Buffet and Goldman Sachs. But that was highly secret.
Making mean comments is good, as important to the mind as gymnastic to the body.

Indeed, otherwise, one may never criticize anybody. This is the trap in which the opposants to Hitler fell, long ago. Hitler claimed to be a “Socialist” and a “Nationalist”, so that made him impossible to criticize for the “socialists” and the “nationalists”.

Less dramatically, but more tellingly, the democrats and progressives fell in that trap with Barack Obama. Barack is brown, and a democrat, so if one criticized his incredibly extreme right wing, pro-plutocratic policy, some of them way way way right of Reagan or Bush Sr., one was accused to be… racist (!!!!!!!!!!!!!) and an admirer of Fox news, the Ku Klux Klan, and Sarah Palin. Thus the extreme right wing inclination of Obama, left uncriticized, became a catastrophic avalanche, and here we are. Worse: most of the left, in its anxiety to support Obama, has become extreme right wing itself.

Consequence: 4 years of policy that was, arguably, to the right of G.W. Bush himself. And still pseudo left liars are supporting Obama to the max, instead of the critical reserve that I have made my mantle.

As I have not hidden, Obama is my friend, i know him personally, and I was extremely depressed by his selling out. However, my mean disposition allowed me to be critical right away. If the rest of the Left had acted the same, Obama’s presidency would have been good, instead of the lamentable shipwreck it has turned into (and will get worse if he is re-elected… between us…).

The violation of the 3% deficit rule was viewed, CORRECTLY, by Frankreich und Deutschland as no big deal. However they now have understood that they have to preach rigor by example.

Also the embracing of austerity by France embraces the austerity that Germany embraced when she absorbed the DDR (and which is still going on, as western Germany is still paying for the ex-DDR…) And the austerity that Schroeder also embraced, at great risk to his political career, as he knew, and turned out.

Anyway merkel makes me dizzy.. What that’s proposal to have the EC equipped with veto power on national budget? She will find out that’s not constitutional, as Karlsruhe will tell her… Thanks for continuing to read… BTW, I have long accused French (among others) philosophers to have plagerized Nietzsche…

Read carefully Patrice. I do not support selling people or walking sharks, for that matter. I have only addressed one point and one point only. I’ve even managed to compact it into a simple question that you have not yet answered:

do you think France should be able to force Google to include them in search results…and therefore force Google to pay them?

Sometimes I joke, Amna, as I extoll, for example, your love for bipedal sharks. Should France be able to force Google? Sure. The French republic is mighty. Right now the republic is maneuvering to make war in the Sahara in general, and Mali in particular. So it is lining its ducks. The Algerian duck resisting the lining up, so far, but it’s only a matter of time. France, more or less hiding behind its pupett and ally and friend Qatar (Al Jazeera) pretty much finished the Libyan war all by herself, with some British help. France is now involved in the Syrian war, and not just in administrating 300 cities or so.

So Google? Google guys? Tax evading jumbo jet riding monkeys? Tax evasion is high on the target list in France (and now Europe).

Google will have to pay taxes and for related property rights. And, as I detailled, the French CNIL actually ORDERED Google to change its privacy policy. It’s an order given by all those the CNIL represents, namely, at this point 29 European countries, Canada, and the Asia Pacific Privacy Authority. I guess that will leave Google with pakistan, Mongolia, and the USSR…
PA

wow, so you think France should be able to FORCE Google to list French snippets….and therefore FORCE Google to pay France for the French snippets that Google no longer even wants…..using your slave analogy you love so much, what does that make France? i don’t think slave owners even go this far?

As the French Culture Minster pointed out, France is a democracy with a democratically eleceted government. Google enjoys a fiduciary position, from its quasi monopoly on search. As the Assange/wikiLeaks episode showed, the government of the USA was able to cut their funding. Why? The free market is just a playground. The guys watching the playground, complete with military force, are the ones in charge. In a democracy that military force is controlled by the (government elected by the) People. This why France is officially already intervening in Syria. So Google is nothing, and Google will submit, and, like rich tax evaders in Switzerland, learn to pay taxes, like everybody else. (Recently the Channel Islands grumbled that they would prefer independence, perhaps, than let the UK dictate its tax policy; there again, nothing than a contingent of Royal marines can’t fix!)

Yes, it’s all about FORCE, and it’s high time that democracty use FORCE against plutocrats and thei machinations, or we will end down, like Rome. Al Assad being another example of plutocrat, by the way… Plutocracy is like gangrene: it does not get any better when one lets it grow.PA

Remember that it is the Googlers (US) who make Google strong. Every time I put in four odd words to a topic in my head that I am unable to complete and THEN i SAY “AHA” AND CLICK ON THE CORRECT RESULT, I am moving that link up the food chain.

dear Old Geezer: That a deal is good for some does not make it just, fair, sustainable , wise, in the fullness of time. Obama (and the Fed below him… I know it’s supposed to be independent of the presidency, although not from private banks…) gave the banks a very good deal: here is 8,000 billion dollars, no strings attached. Jamie dimon was given the “Jamie Deal“: here is Bear Sterns, you don’t have to pay for it.

And slavery is always a good deal for those who profit most from it, and had to be set up so that most of the population believed it was good deal for them.

At this point Google is tax cheat, and by being an enabler of free content that refused to cooperate, it helps in the demise of professional journalism. Once that is gone, all that will be left will be paid plutocratic propagandists…

I do not want to do away with Google. I like many of the efforts they are making. I use Android (although I have a Mac Air). I just want them to MODIFY their behavior to become good enough to contribute positively to civilization. Right now their their tax evasion, contribution to the devastation of the conventional media are intolerable, just as their violation of people’s privacy.

To add to all this their insouciant willingness, at the slighest contradiction, to go to war with a leading democracy is revealing of practices so greedy, they have made them demented. They are going to learn France is not the Chinese dictatorship, but something much more radical.
PA

Your article is absolutely brilliant. I love how you highlighted previous examples of plutocracy to Google. (It really means that consumers need to rely on other search engines to help the company see that the world’s information is not to mined as part of their intellectual property. See Google’s pattern for “doing no evil. http://su.pr/4mTja1 “

Dear Fruitionmedia: Wellcome to the comments, and thanks a zillion for your compliment! (That’s the way I get paid! ;-)!) Interesting link. Favoring some sites in search is actually against the law of many nations. If Google does this (as has been alledged!) It’s one more problem for them. it can catch up with them, as it is doing with lance Armstrong (who will probably end in the slammer, as he violated various laws).
The law does not catch all, but, like a lion, it needs to eat!
PA

@fruitionmedia thanks very much for the link to ‘Google doing no evil’ — very informative!

I found the following snippet particularly enlightening:

The search engine company won the case, referencing that satellite technology and aerial photography make “complete privacy” non-existent.”

Personally, I think that says it all. It certainly confirms my belief that no matter how ethically pure any business may be when it sets out, there comes a stage in its growth where it becomes totally corrupt. (And, clearly, unless we recognise and acknowledge that, nothing can change.)

Dear Pendantry: You are 100% on target. The Plutocratic hypothesis says this exactly. The plutocratic phenomenon is intrinsically exponential. So it tends to devour the universe. Periodically plutocracy reappears, being exponential, and has to be cut down to size, using force. (BTW, there is an intersting analogy with the inflaton/cosmological Big Bang theory…. Funny thing is that I don’t believe the later, it violates energy conservation, n

The Roman civilization imploded from plutocracy left unchecked (theocracy, namely imperial chrisitanity, was part, and consequence of the plutocratic phenomenon: Catholicism was invented as a state religion about 60 years after emperor Aurelian had invented the cult of Sol Invictus, itself momentary successor to the trinity of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva… The later replaced by the Catholic trinity later: zeus as deus, Juno as Mother of God, Athena/Minerva as the wisdom, the verb, the logos).

I focused on Google, because it is clearly going through the phase cahnge of “Do no evil, that’s our prerogative!”. Fascinating to observe. BTW, even Roman fascism could not go into tracking down what citizens were exactly doing, most of the time. But Google and the like can examine people’s private lives much more thoroughly. In that sense things are changing, for the worse.
PA

BTW, we are already at the point where we do not know whether the hilarious video is real, or not. Next step is tiny flying drones buzzing in your garden and off your window (who owns the airspace?). That could still be made OK, but when Google, making billions in France, and paying zero tax there, is allowed to go on that way, the result will be that Google will get all the money, id est, the power, and the states, the democratically elected government, will get no power, that means we will be left powerless.
It’s already depicted by the fact that, Google itself has several individuals “worth” billions and some above 15 billion dollars.

And then people such as Amna fly to their rescue, because they got some free crumbs. (Funny part I met personally with the guys who really invented Google, years before thay did; at the time those billionaires were looking for a search engine of their own, having correctly determined that, if they concentrated on search, they could do better than Yahoo! In other words, there is nothing that Mr. Brin and Page are so incredibly special about: smarter, immensely rich foxes just needed to go around already existing search engine IP… A similar phenomenon with facebook, this time with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, etc. behind…)
PA

Next step is tiny flying drones buzzing in your garedn and off your window (who owns the airspace?).

I call them ‘splies’ – flying spy eyes. Splies actually feature in one of the books I’ve, ah, I’ve not actually written yet (but would have done if I’d got my round tuit). It’d be no s’prise at all to me when the first privacy lawsuit is brought against someone using splies to create porn movies… and Gopornogle++ wins it on the grounds that “… technology make ‘complete privacy’ non-existent.”

Dear Pendantry: We are living in a Big Brother world already. And the worst is that a lot of it comes from the left.

The New York Times censored two of my (very mild!) comments, just today. They don’t like to not be able to pose as fair and progressive. Funny me, the big time leftist, having long used the neologism “Murderoch” always got censored on the left… and not, never… on the right. The WSJ has never censored me. Whereas, just in the last ten days, the New York Times selected me for two of their “PICKS” (meaning excpetionally interesting comments), but then they censored me at least a dozen times… And I am self censoring these days because I don’t feel good about Obama losing (although he fully deserves it, I am not happy with what is going to happen)…

It had huge consequences: the entire Obama economico-financial policy of Obama has been a big time failure, and extension of Bush, basically, and that policy was engineered by the sort of people who decide what should appear in the NYT (which was just as bad as what is in the WSJ… while posing as the opsite; I subscribe to both…)
PA

Nobody mentioned that Google may huff and puff the monopolist’s huff and puff, but if and when it acts on its threat, net users interested in French sites will simply move to (for example) Yahoo. Which I just did.

So thankful for “allodial”! Now whenever a Brit taunts me on Napoleonic law and the (naturally) superior common law system, I’ll taunt back with “at least my house stands on allodial land, you vassal!”

Dear Dominique: Yes the manants have been quite insolent. Time to signify to them that they should practice good manners corresponding to their lower status!

Another thing to remind the Brits is that they fabricated Napoleon. By attacking the Constitutional Monarchy, headed by the revolutionary Louis XVI, in 1792. Napoleon freed Toulon from the British Army, and fascism took over. So, in a sense, the dictator Napoleon was the best agent that the British plutocracy ever had.

I know for a fact that Google plays games with searches and classifications (although it’s against the law). For many years, I have made less than 3% of my searches on Google, in retaliation. The scariest part is that these people at Google are so stupid and immoral that they think they can threaten a democracy… A large democracy. And win!

That tells us something about the ambiance in Silicon Valley. I guess after years and hundreds of visits of Obama, hat in hand, coming to eat in their hands, and sleep in their beds, and give them billions of public money, they deep down inside believe they have it made! They should go back to school and write November 6, 2012, 1,000 times, until they get how it’s spelled!
PA

[…] with the preceding: In a press conference headed up by French culture minister Aurélie Filippetti (Google’s enemy), Harvey Weinstein threw his support behind the cultural exception. “The cultural exception […]

[…] with the preceding: In a press conference headed up by French culture minister Aurélie Filippetti (Google’s enemy), Harvey Weinstein threw his support behind the cultural exception. “The cultural exception […]